A Transportation and Land Use Blog

Five Things I Hope to Hear Less Often in 2015

“High speed rail won’t work in the US, because our density is too low.”
Density definitely matters when deciding which transit mode is appropriate (40-foot bus on an hourly headway vs. a ten-car subway train on 5-minute headways), especially for local trips. However, the longer the journey, the less density surrounding the stations will ridership levels. If this density fallacy were true, only the people living around airports would fly!

“Spending taxpayer funds to support transit is a wasteful luxury, because we already have a system of cars and highways.”
This is one of the typical arguments put forth by Randal O’Toole and others at the Cato Institute. It makes several false assumptions. Chief among them are that the system of cars and highways: 1. works well, 2. pays for itself, 3. exerts no negative externalities on society, 4. is accessible to all, and 5. is what people want.

“People don’t want to walk and ride bikes.”
Every year people pay a lot of money to visit highly walkable places like Disneyland. These places tend to be visited more by those Americans living in the less walkable suburbs. When it comes to biking, all I have are two words: Amsterdam and Copenhagen.

“If transit comes to my neighborhood, crime will increase.”
This one especially bothers me, since I’ve seen transit proposals die because of it. It shows how wild people will allow their imaginations to run, while at the same time denying themselves the benefits that should be blatantly obvious to them. Somehow I just can’t imagine someone breaking in to a home, stealing a TV, and then riding away on a train!

So I was in a sour mood when I wrote this. It was originally titled “Bullshit,” but I changed the title, since I didn’t want to scare away potential readers. I figured that I should start 2015 off right and do some ranting. 😉 LOL